Dynamics Portals – Using SSL Certificates and Custom Domains – Part 2: Generate PFX and Upload it to the Portal

Hello team,

Let’s finish this series! Before we go into the final details I would like to say big THANK YOU to my colleage Ronald Menezes(@menezesr1) for his patience in explaining how certificates work 🙂

In the previous post we had a look at how we could generate a Certificate Signing Request (CSR), so we could send it to a Third Party Authority and get a certificate from them.

Now we are going to pick right after we receive the certificate.

What the Third Party would normally give you are a bunch of files looking like this:

The first file is the certificate that has been granted to us and is in the format .crt, the rest of the files are the certificate chain.

What do we need to do?

Convert the .CRT to .PFX
Import it in the Portal Configuration

Converting the .CRT to .PFX

Open the Management Console again (Windows + R => mmc)
Right Click and select Import
Select the Certificate (.CRT) that the Authority Provided
Place it on the Personal Location, leave it untouched.
Once imported one of the key things we need to check is that we have a little key next to the Certificate icon, this means that it has a private key!
Next step right click on the certificate and select Export
When the wizard asks us if we want to export it with the Private Key please choose Yes
Choose .PFX and make sure you mark the option to include all certificates in the certificate path
Give it a password, and REMEMBER IT, you will need it!
Specify a location and finish it!
Ok so now we should have a .PFX file that we can import in the portal, so let’s do that!
On the Portal page click on “Manage SSL Certificates” and the + button
Remember the password that I mentioned we were going to need? Here it is
And that’s it, you have now uploaded your SSL certificate, in order to use it when setting up your custom domain for the portal remember to select it after you have configured your domain.